Oct 10, 2026, 9:12 AM@datarama heh, I got "koala" as my nickname in university. Lately I'm more into capybaras, but a critter that sleeps seems so much more intelligent than us.
To make it fair, maybe you should have included in the list animals that hurt severely their peers, if there are any...
Oct 10, 2026, 11:34 AM
@coder @dl2jml I think humans have mastered some specific kinds of self-destructive shortsighted stupidity that no other animal on the planet can aspire to.
Komodo dragons sometimes cannibalize their young. But I'm pretty sure that no komodo dragon has ever thought it was a good idea to build a nuclear stockpile. And no komodo dragon has ever asked ChatGPT to write its blog.
@dl2jml @coder In komodo dragons' case, it's a lot simpler: They're hungry and don't have kin recognition. Anything that's small enough to easily take out in a fight is food.
This isn't to say that komodo dragons are dumb in general - they're definitely not. They can count, recognize familiar individuals (though they don't have a concept of "kin", hence they'll readily eat their own children), they hunt strategically rather than rely on simple brute force, and they readily learn how to interact with humans. When they're small, they adapt to living in treetops and masking their own scent to avoid being eaten by their parents. They almost certainly outsmart both ostriches, koalas, cane toads and programmers!
But, well, there's the cannibalism. They'll eat their own kids because they're just prey to them! That seems like a pretty self-destructive impulse.
(This isn't universal to monitor lizards. Timor monitors, for example, only very rarely cannibalize each other, apparently only if they're starving. Nile monitors will lay eggs in termite mounds and return 8-9 months later to make an escape hole for the hatchlings (but provide no further parental care). But to a komodo dragon, one's own young are just food.).
@coder I included programmers, didn't I?